Rational inequality
ON SATURDAY, hundreds of girls will flock to Caltech to celebrate the joys of science. Targeted at fifth- to eighth-graders, the Sally Ride Science Festival will encourage its pony-tailed and barretted audience to see science as a viable, vibrant career option. That Ride is using her cachet as our most famous female astronaut to champion the cause of girls in science is to be applauded; what is so dispiriting is that such efforts are still needed.
When I was a physics student in the late 1970s, there was hope that women’s march into science and engineering was on an assured ascent. I and my fellow female students believed that in our lifetimes we would see equal numbers of boys and girls coming into our fields. That hope has not panned out.
According to the National Science Foundation, women make up a quarter of the nation’s science and engineering workforce, a percentage that has changed little in the last decade. In some areas, such as computer science, women’s participation has declined from its peak in the 1980s. In the biological sciences, women hold one-third of PhD-level jobs. In physics, the figure is 14%; in engineering, 8%. At Caltech, just 39 of 287 professors are women.
Studies show that in the fourth grade, girls and boys like science and math in much the same proportions. Yet, by the eighth grade, twice as many boys remain interested.
Girls’ ambivalence toward science mirrors society’s ambivalence toward female scientists. Last year, Lawrence H. Summers, president of Harvard, suggested that perhaps women were less represented in the physical sciences because they were less likely to have the requisite mental skills. Women scientists across the country protested, but Summers had expressed a belief that is far more deeply entrenched in our society than many feminists realized.
The idea that women are less innately inclined to rational, and especially to quantitative, thinking goes back to the very dawn of the Western intellectual tradition. It originates in the 5th century BC with the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras of Samos, the man who envisaged what would eventually become the modern science of physics and who first associated numbers with the male mind.
The word “rational” derives from the mathematical concept of ratio. It was Pythagoras who discovered that intervals of the musical scale could be associated with simple ratios between the lengths of the strings on an instrument such as a lyre. For two notes an octave apart, one of the strings will be twice as long as the other, a ratio of 2 to 1.
Taking music as his model, Pythagoras decided that the structure of the universe could be described by such ratios: the “music of the spheres.” This concept would prove uniquely influential in the development of the Western scientific tradition, up to and including the search for a “theory of everything.” And all along, the quest would be seen as an inherently masculine pursuit.
The modern flowering of Pythagoreanism dates to the 16th and 17th centuries. While it is true that scientists then were interested in solving practical problems, such as how to navigate ships and how to chuck cannon balls, the search for the “harmonies” of the world was what drove all the great figures of the scientific revolution -- Copernicus, Kepler and Newton specifically.
Pythagorean thinking was profoundly dualistic, dividing all things -- physical and mental -- into male and female camps. Mathematics was placed firmly on the male side of the ledger because it was the male mind alone that was said to be capable of reaching toward the ultimate. The female, supposedly grounded in her material body, was “naturally” on the earthly side of the balance sheet and by her very nature innately unsuited to the sublime task of manipulating numbers. Ever since, females have been seen as inherently unsuited to rational thinking.
A gendered view of mathematics was taken for granted by most Renaissance thinkers, and when the first scientific societies were founded, almost all excluded women. Not until 1945 was a woman admitted as a full member to the Royal Society, still the world’s most prestigious scientific institution. Its first secretary, Henry Oldenburg, spoke for many of his fellows when he summed up the society’s mission as “to raise a masculine philosophy” of nature.
The universities were founded to train the clergy, so women were also excluded there. But universities were the only places where mathematics was taught. Denied access to math education, women were unable to participate in the history of physics. In fact, until the 20th century there were virtually no female physicists. Even then doors remained closed: The physics department at Harvard did not give tenure to a woman until 1992.
Two thousand years after Pythagoras, we are on the verge of hearing the most symphonic of cosmic harmonies in a unified theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. But this magnificent quest has also left its imprint on our culture in an abiding tendency to still regard math and science as innately male. In such a climate, young girls of a scientific bent need all the support and encouragement they can get.
